ProPublica
@ProPublica@newsie.social  ·  activity timestamp 9 hours ago

A Tarrant County resident who has worked as an election judge criticized the county’s move to cut more than 100 polling sites.

“You’re not saving money,” she said. “You’re sacrificing democracy to save a buck.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/tarrant-county-texas-polling-sites-early-voting-cuts?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#News#Texas#TarrantCounty#Vote#Elections #Democracy#Voting
Michael Magras
@michaelmagras@mstdn.social  ·  activity timestamp last week

Yes! A million times yes! This passage is from an interview with Zohran Mamdani in the September 2025 issue of The Nation. I've been making a similar point for ages. Somewhere along the line, "efficiency" became associated with the right. It should be identified with the left. There is nothing inherently conservative about efficiency. Mamdani beautiful explains why. #Politics #Economy#Economics#Democrats #Democracy #NewYork#ZohranMamdani #US #USpol

A quote from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani: "The example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often. What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks."
A quote from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani: "The example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often. What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks."
A quote from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani: "The example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often. What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks."
Michael Magras
@michaelmagras@mstdn.social  ·  activity timestamp last week

Yes! A million times yes! This passage is from an interview with Zohran Mamdani in the September 2025 issue of The Nation. I've been making a similar point for ages. Somewhere along the line, "efficiency" became associated with the right. It should be identified with the left. There is nothing inherently conservative about efficiency. Mamdani beautiful explains why. #Politics #Economy#Economics#Democrats #Democracy #NewYork#ZohranMamdani #US #USpol

A quote from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani: "The example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often. What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks."
A quote from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani: "The example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often. What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks."
A quote from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani: "The example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often. What we have seen in recent years is that the language that should be identified with the left has become associated with the right: language of efficiency, of waste, of quality of life. To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life. Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day: the sewers, the clean drinking water, the parks."
Battalion 👊🗡️⛓️‍💥
@battalion@battalion.mobileatom.net  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

Destroying Autocracy – July 3, 2025

Welcome to this week’s “Destroying Autocracy”.

It’s your source for curated news affecting democracy in the cyber arena with a focus on protecting it. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. Since big media’s journalism wing is flailing and failing in its core duty to democracy, this is also a collection of alternative reporting on the eternal battle between autocracy and democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can’t be free without safety and privacy.

DA comes out on Thursday and is updated through the end of day on Friday. Then we start over. So take your time in perusing it and check back in over the weekend.

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ’em.

Next week I will be on holiday so there won’t be an issue. I will probably boost some things on the Fediverse though.

Featured Item

DevCollaborative writes:

The Trump administration and its supporters are attacking dissenting views on a terrifying scale. With so much of online communications compromised and censored, independent websites are a critical piece of social movement infrastructure that we need to promote and defend.

If your nonprofit has a website, you are part of this essential communications work.

There are looming threats of financially independent nonprofits being censored under the guise of fighting “terrorism” or “sedition.”

Protecting Nonprofit Websites from a Hostile Government

We start and end with good news to make the middle bearable.

The response to Russia’s War Crimes, Techno Feudalism, and other douchebaggery

Time has a profile:

How Signal President Meredith Whittaker Took on Signal-Gate

The Register reports:

Proton bashes Apple and joins antitrust suit that seeks to throw the App Store wide open

Huawei can’t wriggle out of Iran sanctions trial, judge rules

Wikidata: Attempting to bridge FOSS ideals and direct democracy

Tara Tarakiyee explores:

Digital Sovereignty in Practice: Web Browsers as a Reality Check

TechPolicy reports:

EU Disinformation Code Takes Effect Amid Censorship Claims and Trade Tensions

TechCrunch reports:

EU says it will continue rolling out AI legislation on schedule

Politico reports:

The first American ‘scientific refugees’ arrive in France

BleepingComputer reports:

Hikvision Canada ordered to cease operations over security risks

Germany asks Google, Apple to remove DeepSeek AI from app stores

Raconteur has:

‘You need to be a little bit crazy’: Nextcloud CEO on confronting the hyperscalers

Nextclound reports on:

Why organizations migrate from Microsoft 365 in 2025

TechCrunch reports:

ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral overnight after Bondi criticism

Ars Technica reports:

Meta, TikTok can’t toss wrongful death suit from mom of “subway surfing” teen

Ted Cruz plan to punish states that regulate AI shot down in 99-1 vote

The Markup has more:

State AI regulations safe after Senate strips moratorium from ‘big, beautiful bill’

MIT Technology Review reports:

Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites

Cloudfare has the details:

Control content use for AI training with Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt and blocking for monetized content

The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers

Neutral

CNBC reports:

The AI-boom’s multi-billion dollar blind spot: Reasoning models hitting a wall

Dries Buyaert (of Drupal fame) writes:

The web’s broken deal with AI companies

Dries, you say you may be naive. You are if you think anything other than politics (regulation or huge boycotts) are going to fix the problem.

The Evil Empire (AKA Autocracy) Strikes Back

The Guardian opines:

Peter Thiel’s Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans

TechDirt reports:

Supreme Court Cripples FCC Further, Making Robocall Enforcement Likely Impossible

The Supreme C^nts strike again.

The Guardian reports:

Trump officials create searchable national citizenship database

TechPolicy reports:

Countering the Politics of Deservingness in the Fight for Digital Equity

How US Firms Are Weakening the EU AI Code of Practice

Pariah States

TechCrunch reports:

US government takes down major North Korean ‘remote IT workers’ operation

DarkReading reports:

Scope, Scale of Spurious North Korean IT Workers Emerges

Silver Fox Suspected in Taiwanese Campaign Using DeepSeek Lure

Russian APT ‘Gamaredon’ Hits Ukraine With Fierce Phishing

The Kyiv Independent reports:

US sanctions Russian IT company Aeza Group over ransomware operations

Big Media

The PressGazette reports:

How SFGATE is making local news pay and filling California’s news gaps

Ars Technica reports:

NYT to start searching deleted ChatGPT logs after beating OpenAI in court

Torment Nexus reports:

Why Substack shouldn’t be the future of online publishing

CNN reports:

After settling with Trump, CBS News staffers fear what comes next

There are cowards, and then there are cowardly c^nts.

Big Tech

TechPolicy reports:

Tech Oligarchs and the Rise of Silicon Valley Pronatalism

The Guardian reports:

Fears AI factcheckers on X could increase promotion of conspiracy theories

Ars Technica reports:

Everything that could go wrong with X’s new AI-written community notes

TikTok is being flooded with racist AI videos generated by Google’s Veo 3

Android Authority reports:

You’re not alone: This email from Google’s Gemini team was concerning (Updated: Google statement)

Open Web Advocacy reports on:

Google’s Hotseat Hypocrisy

Tuta asks:

“Sovereign cloud” or “sovereign washing”? A Trojan Horse at Europe’s digital gates.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Flock Safety’s Feature Updates Cannot Make Automated License Plate Readers Safe

The Register reports:

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren’t AI at all

AI models just don’t understand what they’re talking about

The Verge reports:

Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos

TechCrunch reports:

Meta users say paying for Verified support has been useless in the face of mass bans

TechCrunch reports:

Meta has found another way to keep you engaged: Chatbots that message you first

I guess if you are amoral enough to use Meta products and you are a moron who talks to AI, this is what you deserve.

PC Gamer reports:

‘AI is no longer optional’: Microsoft is allegedly pressuring employees to use AI tools through manager evaluations

Cybersecurity/Privacy

The Verge asks:

How vulnerable is critical infrastructure to cyberattack in the US?

Bleeping Computer reports:

FBI: Cybercriminals steal health data posing as fraud investigators

BleepingComputer reports:

Spain arrests hackers who targeted politicians and journalists

Fediverse

Connected Places has:

Fediverse Report – #123

Mastodon has:

Mastodon 4.4 for Developers

Dead Superher looks at:

Mitigating the “7 Deadly Fediverse UX Sins”

Jaz-Michael King shares:

Digital Belonging: Why Language and Locality Matter

Viger has:

Flipboard Surf

TechCrunch reports:

Automattic puts Tumblr migration to WordPress on hold

Ghost has:

The Longformers: Ghost, WordPress, Flipboard, Fediverse

NodeBB asks:

What drew you to ActivityPub?

Longform content has the best chance to grow the Fediverse, IMHO.

IT Notes shares:

FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands

Forgejo has its:

Forgejo monthly report – June 2025

ActivityPub for WordPress announces:

HTTP Signature Upgrades Coming Soon

TechCrunch reports:

Not everyone is thrilled with Threads’ DMs

RSS

Preslav Rachev shares:

From Outbound to Inbound and Back Again: The Hidden Power of RSS Feeds

Great stuff. RSS is still my main curation source. So, get an RSS feed on your blog, handle, etc. 🙂

Slightly Federated Social Media

Connected Places has:

Bluesky Report – #123

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

  • That’s it for this week. Please share this edition of Destroying Autocracy.
  • Follow me on the Fediverse. Or this site via the button in the footer. Or via RSS.

Keep fighting!

Reuben Walker headshot

Ringleader, Battalion
Reuben Walker
Follow me on the Fediverse

#123 #ActivityPub #AI #Autocracy #BigJournalism #BigTech #Democracy #Fascism #Fediverse #Forgejo #Ghost #Mastodon #NodeBB #RSS #StopChina #StopIran #StopIsrael #StopRedAmerica #StopRussia #SupportUkraine #TechnoAnarchism #TechnoFeudalism #WordPress

https://battalion.mobileatom.net/?p=2072
David on Formosa
@davidonformosa@mstdn.social  ·  activity timestamp last month

Michael Turton shows that the recall campaign in Taiwan is part of a long history of civil society resisting government misrule

"To understand how a campaign like this could organize itself with such effectiveness, it is important to situate public anger and public action in the centuries of resistance to external power that has deep, abiding roots in collective social action throughout the Qing, Japanese and KMT colonial periods."

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2025/07/14/2003840246

#Taiwan#democracy #activism #台灣大罷免
David on Formosa
@davidonformosa@mstdn.social  ·  activity timestamp last month

Michael Turton shows that the recall campaign in Taiwan is part of a long history of civil society resisting government misrule

"To understand how a campaign like this could organize itself with such effectiveness, it is important to situate public anger and public action in the centuries of resistance to external power that has deep, abiding roots in collective social action throughout the Qing, Japanese and KMT colonial periods."

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2025/07/14/2003840246

#Taiwan#democracy #activism #台灣大罷免
Battalion 👊🗡️⛓️‍💥
@battalion@battalion.mobileatom.net  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

Destroying Autocracy – July 3, 2025

Welcome to this week’s “Destroying Autocracy”.

It’s your source for curated news affecting democracy in the cyber arena with a focus on protecting it. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. Since big media’s journalism wing is flailing and failing in its core duty to democracy, this is also a collection of alternative reporting on the eternal battle between autocracy and democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can’t be free without safety and privacy.

DA comes out on Thursday and is updated through the end of day on Friday. Then we start over. So take your time in perusing it and check back in over the weekend.

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ’em.

Next week I will be on holiday so there won’t be an issue. I will probably boost some things on the Fediverse though.

Featured Item

DevCollaborative writes:

The Trump administration and its supporters are attacking dissenting views on a terrifying scale. With so much of online communications compromised and censored, independent websites are a critical piece of social movement infrastructure that we need to promote and defend.

If your nonprofit has a website, you are part of this essential communications work.

There are looming threats of financially independent nonprofits being censored under the guise of fighting “terrorism” or “sedition.”

Protecting Nonprofit Websites from a Hostile Government

We start and end with good news to make the middle bearable.

The response to Russia’s War Crimes, Techno Feudalism, and other douchebaggery

Time has a profile:

How Signal President Meredith Whittaker Took on Signal-Gate

The Register reports:

Proton bashes Apple and joins antitrust suit that seeks to throw the App Store wide open

Huawei can’t wriggle out of Iran sanctions trial, judge rules

Wikidata: Attempting to bridge FOSS ideals and direct democracy

Tara Tarakiyee explores:

Digital Sovereignty in Practice: Web Browsers as a Reality Check

TechPolicy reports:

EU Disinformation Code Takes Effect Amid Censorship Claims and Trade Tensions

TechCrunch reports:

EU says it will continue rolling out AI legislation on schedule

Politico reports:

The first American ‘scientific refugees’ arrive in France

BleepingComputer reports:

Hikvision Canada ordered to cease operations over security risks

Germany asks Google, Apple to remove DeepSeek AI from app stores

Raconteur has:

‘You need to be a little bit crazy’: Nextcloud CEO on confronting the hyperscalers

Nextclound reports on:

Why organizations migrate from Microsoft 365 in 2025

TechCrunch reports:

ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral overnight after Bondi criticism

Ars Technica reports:

Meta, TikTok can’t toss wrongful death suit from mom of “subway surfing” teen

Ted Cruz plan to punish states that regulate AI shot down in 99-1 vote

The Markup has more:

State AI regulations safe after Senate strips moratorium from ‘big, beautiful bill’

MIT Technology Review reports:

Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites

Cloudfare has the details:

Control content use for AI training with Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt and blocking for monetized content

The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers

Neutral

CNBC reports:

The AI-boom’s multi-billion dollar blind spot: Reasoning models hitting a wall

Dries Buyaert (of Drupal fame) writes:

The web’s broken deal with AI companies

Dries, you say you may be naive. You are if you think anything other than politics (regulation or huge boycotts) are going to fix the problem.

The Evil Empire (AKA Autocracy) Strikes Back

The Guardian opines:

Peter Thiel’s Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans

TechDirt reports:

Supreme Court Cripples FCC Further, Making Robocall Enforcement Likely Impossible

The Supreme C^nts strike again.

The Guardian reports:

Trump officials create searchable national citizenship database

TechPolicy reports:

Countering the Politics of Deservingness in the Fight for Digital Equity

How US Firms Are Weakening the EU AI Code of Practice

Pariah States

TechCrunch reports:

US government takes down major North Korean ‘remote IT workers’ operation

DarkReading reports:

Scope, Scale of Spurious North Korean IT Workers Emerges

Silver Fox Suspected in Taiwanese Campaign Using DeepSeek Lure

Russian APT ‘Gamaredon’ Hits Ukraine With Fierce Phishing

The Kyiv Independent reports:

US sanctions Russian IT company Aeza Group over ransomware operations

Big Media

The PressGazette reports:

How SFGATE is making local news pay and filling California’s news gaps

Ars Technica reports:

NYT to start searching deleted ChatGPT logs after beating OpenAI in court

Torment Nexus reports:

Why Substack shouldn’t be the future of online publishing

CNN reports:

After settling with Trump, CBS News staffers fear what comes next

There are cowards, and then there are cowardly c^nts.

Big Tech

TechPolicy reports:

Tech Oligarchs and the Rise of Silicon Valley Pronatalism

The Guardian reports:

Fears AI factcheckers on X could increase promotion of conspiracy theories

Ars Technica reports:

Everything that could go wrong with X’s new AI-written community notes

TikTok is being flooded with racist AI videos generated by Google’s Veo 3

Android Authority reports:

You’re not alone: This email from Google’s Gemini team was concerning (Updated: Google statement)

Open Web Advocacy reports on:

Google’s Hotseat Hypocrisy

Tuta asks:

“Sovereign cloud” or “sovereign washing”? A Trojan Horse at Europe’s digital gates.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Flock Safety’s Feature Updates Cannot Make Automated License Plate Readers Safe

The Register reports:

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren’t AI at all

AI models just don’t understand what they’re talking about

The Verge reports:

Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos

TechCrunch reports:

Meta users say paying for Verified support has been useless in the face of mass bans

TechCrunch reports:

Meta has found another way to keep you engaged: Chatbots that message you first

I guess if you are amoral enough to use Meta products and you are a moron who talks to AI, this is what you deserve.

PC Gamer reports:

‘AI is no longer optional’: Microsoft is allegedly pressuring employees to use AI tools through manager evaluations

Cybersecurity/Privacy

The Verge asks:

How vulnerable is critical infrastructure to cyberattack in the US?

Bleeping Computer reports:

FBI: Cybercriminals steal health data posing as fraud investigators

BleepingComputer reports:

Spain arrests hackers who targeted politicians and journalists

Fediverse

Connected Places has:

Fediverse Report – #123

Mastodon has:

Mastodon 4.4 for Developers

Dead Superher looks at:

Mitigating the “7 Deadly Fediverse UX Sins”

Jaz-Michael King shares:

Digital Belonging: Why Language and Locality Matter

Viger has:

Flipboard Surf

TechCrunch reports:

Automattic puts Tumblr migration to WordPress on hold

Ghost has:

The Longformers: Ghost, WordPress, Flipboard, Fediverse

NodeBB asks:

What drew you to ActivityPub?

Longform content has the best chance to grow the Fediverse, IMHO.

IT Notes shares:

FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands

Forgejo has its:

Forgejo monthly report – June 2025

ActivityPub for WordPress announces:

HTTP Signature Upgrades Coming Soon

TechCrunch reports:

Not everyone is thrilled with Threads’ DMs

RSS

Preslav Rachev shares:

From Outbound to Inbound and Back Again: The Hidden Power of RSS Feeds

Great stuff. RSS is still my main curation source. So, get an RSS feed on your blog, handle, etc. 🙂

Slightly Federated Social Media

Connected Places has:

Bluesky Report – #123

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

  • That’s it for this week. Please share this edition of Destroying Autocracy.
  • Follow me on the Fediverse. Or this site via the button in the footer. Or via RSS.

Keep fighting!

Reuben Walker headshot

Ringleader, Battalion
Reuben Walker
Follow me on the Fediverse

#123 #ActivityPub #AI #Autocracy #BigJournalism #BigTech #Democracy #Fascism #Fediverse #Forgejo #Ghost #Mastodon #NodeBB #RSS #StopChina #StopIran #StopIsrael #StopRedAmerica #StopRussia #SupportUkraine #TechnoAnarchism #TechnoFeudalism #WordPress

https://battalion.mobileatom.net/?p=2072
f15h :mastodon: :coffefied: 🇺🇦
@f15h@mstdn.social  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@davva23 @wandrecanada @mvilain @sjvn @pluralistic Closer to 1914, during #WW1: “Tobacco was valued as a #wartime necessity, a fact that the tobacco #industry seized upon in its #advertising that featured #soldiers, flags, and all the trappings of a triumphal nation making the world safe for #democracy. At home, tobacco funds were established to ‘send smokes to the boys’, eventually sending 16 billion cigarettes as part of relief by the war’s end.”
https://csts.ua.edu/wwi/introduction/
f15h :mastodon: :coffefied: 🇺🇦
@f15h@mstdn.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@davva23 @wandrecanada @mvilain @sjvn @pluralistic Closer to 1914, during #WW1: “Tobacco was valued as a #wartime necessity, a fact that the tobacco #industry seized upon in its #advertising that featured #soldiers, flags, and all the trappings of a triumphal nation making the world safe for #democracy. At home, tobacco funds were established to ‘send smokes to the boys’, eventually sending 16 billion cigarettes as part of relief by the war’s end.”
https://csts.ua.edu/wwi/introduction/
Michael Magras
@michaelmagras@mstdn.social  ·  activity timestamp 5 months ago

Golly, I wonder why France can bar a candidate from running for president after a court conviction, but the US couldn't do it. Some countries are more civilized and have a greater sense of decency than others, I guess. #Politics #Democracy #France #US #USA #USpol #MarineLePenhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/31/marine-le-pen-barred-from-running-for-french-presidency-in-2027